Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Eng 9: Struggles, Empathy & Self-Advocacy

We started a empathy & self-advocacy two-day experience in English on Tuesday and Wednesday. Our goal is to build up our capacity for understanding the struggles of others, helping them find solutions, and better understanding our struggles and strategies for asking for help.

That's a lot of commas.

Here's what we've done so far . . .

We started with an anonymous Google Form and gathered up examples of struggles we know folks -- and ourselves -- experience. Here are screenshots of the results.

We conducted a Notice (Observations)/Wish (Reactions)/Wonder (Questions) with this data. Here are a couple of the results from this work.

Mrs. Grohoski then distributed index cards with a struggle on one side and a blank on the other. We made three columns on the blank side: Difficult, Easy, and Help Needed. We tried to get into the POV of someone with that struggle and list tasks that might be difficult, those that might be easy, and help that person might need.

After a minute or two to process on your own, you circulated around the room and gathered input from several folks, adding to the columns.

You then had five minutes to write/record from the point of view of a person with this struggle. Imagine what a typical school day morning is like for this person. Use 1st person point of view ('I got up this morning . . . ) to create a journal/video/audio.

We synthesized that point of view into trying to fill out a scholarship application from the point of view this same character. We did not give you much guidance in filling it out because we want you thinking about what it's like to struggle when you are unsure of an answer -- what do you do? What would this person do? How might they respond to this challenge?

Period 4B managed get into a little jenga block roots 2 activity.

Next class, we will have four new stations, we will be practicing self-advocacy and we will be getting caught up on blogging and putting evidence of learning in our Eng 9 IN folders.